← Making It with Jon Davids
Making It with Jon Davids
231 - "This Is Why Your Company Will Fail" | Daniel Rowles, host of Digital Marketing Podcast
00:12:04
Loading summary
Transcript20 lines
- [00:00]
A
This clip of Making it with Jon Davids features John talking to Daniel Rolls, host of the digital marketing podcast.
- [00:10]
B
When you talk about business failures, are you seeing that more in the startup world failure, or are you saying that established companies are going to start to fall like dominoes?
- [00:19]
C
Yeah. So what we've seen is that it used to be, if I took you back three years, the stat was it was about 70% of business disruption. So someone entering a market and disrupting in some way was done by startups. So you'd have your kind of credit card app would suddenly turn up and it was competing with the major banks. Okay, so that was that level of disruption. What's now interesting is a stat we looked at Imperial College a couple of weeks ago is 72% of market disruption is now by industry incumbents. So suddenly people in the market are starting to adapt and adopt these kind of things, which means if you're not, you're at risk from startups and competitors that are being smart about this. So actually we're seeing a faster failure rate with startups because there's so many ideas being thrown into the market. It's so much easier to launch stuff now with AI that a lot of it's failing, maybe because it's not a great idea, maybe because it's not really planned out particularly well, haven't understand the customer need and so on. But also we're seeing existing organizations getting disrupted more quickly as well. So in a large market where you have lots of infrastructure in place, so if you were to look at retail, you know, getting a new grocery retailer coming to market is not an easy thing to do because you've got huge infrastructure that sits behind it. But actually, if you are a university is a great example. If you're a training business, actually you can do some really smart stuff that used to be really hard to build. And it infuriates me. I mean, you know, Target Internet is basically a training company. And what we see is that we're having to innovate more and more quickly to stay up to date with things that people now can just buy off the shelf and throw into the market. So unless we really get our brand and understand what differentiates us and so on. So what's interesting is you've got to adopt this kind of innovation process of being really good at taking things to market quickly, experimenting and so on. You need a culture of learning because you need to be constantly learning about this new stuff, but actually need to go back to the old school as well, which is to say what's our brand? What do we stand for? What do our customers actually want? And you need all of that stuff aligned. And a lot of us haven't got those fundamentals right.
- [02:21]
A
It's so true.
- [02:22]
B
AI is kind of a double edged sword in the way I see it in that you have obviously, and this is so over discussed, I won't even get into it. But you know, lots of potential, opportunity, scale, et cetera, et cetera. But the other side of it is it's creating a lot of laziness and a lot of over aligns. And I see this even with my own peers and colleagues, not in my company per se, but others where I'll be looking at, you know, they'll send me a piece of copywriting they've done or they'll say hey, I just wrote a new, you know, a new tagline or a new thing thing for our website. What do you think? And they'll say I just wrote. And then the spiel they send me clearly was written by ChatGPT. Because I can see all the telltale dive into this and Dell and say, okay, you didn't think of those words and if you did, you're not very good at this because it sounds like a robot wrote it.
- [03:04]
A
I feel like there's a bit of.
- [03:05]
B
A laziness and people are getting ahead of their skis. I think AI will get there in two, three, four years. But these days people use it as though it's like the smartest friend or the smartest colleague they have. It's really not there yet for the most part. And then, you know, but the reason I say it's double edged is because the companies that do know how to work the prompts and actually use it in the right way, there is a lot of potential there.
- [03:28]
C
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean we've done a load of surveying around this and we've seen that when we ask most organizations, something like 70% of them have dabbled with ChatGPT for example. So they played around with it, they test out, maybe got to write some stuff they haven't got to the stage of teaching it tone of voice effectively, of building it like a cancel list of words. Do not use this phrase, you know, exactly some of the phrases you were just talking about. And actually it's that whole piece of learning and staying on top of what is the latest large language model with even with ChatGPT, you know, how more effective is this version, the previous version, are we utilizing it effectively? And so on. So there's that big differentiator between learning as well. And I think if there's one big superpower for companies that are going to do well in this environment, it's that culture of learning piece. It's, you know, if you've got that thing of yes, we do send people to training courses, but also are they listening to podcasts, do we have peer groups they're getting together? Do they have a community that they're part of? Because that, you know, that community engagement to make a huge difference, that's the stuff that's embedding the learning in. And it's got to be that culture of learning that it means it's, it's ongoing. It's not just an add on, it's not something, you know, once a month we go off to a training course, have a bit of a jolly and, you know, come back and just carry on as business, as normal. Because you can't have a culture of innovation without having a culture of learning.
- [04:44]
B
I love that.
- [04:47]
A
This episode is brought to you by my Playbook social media selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Let's be real, you don't want likes, you want sales. You want to know that customers are going to show up every day from the content you're already posting. This Playbook shows you how that's done, how to turn social posts into cash flow and how to scale in a way that's simple, repeatable and on brand. Grab it free right now@johndavids.com playbook that's johndavids.com playbook.
- [05:20]
B
Yeah, it's a good segue, actually, to my first prediction, which is I think we're going to see a lot more reliance and leaning into the creative as opposed to the quantitative. And, you know, when I look at our clients over at Influicity, for the longest time, it was all about what's the cpc, what's the cost per conversion. It was, you know, very, I call it marketing math. And that was really all it ever was. And, you know, it still is that because you need to obviously make sure that your dollars are flowing and moving the needle in the right way. But I think what we've seen with the platforms is that creative is really winning the day. It doesn't matter if you have 3, 4, 500,000 followers on Instagram, your content sucks. That reel is not going to be seen. And the flip is also true. If you have 2,000 followers on Instagram, but you put out a banging piece of content, it's going to do really well. And I feel that this is sort of shifting our clients at least into understanding the value of creative brand community.
- [06:17]
A
All those fuzzy words that we talk.
- [06:19]
B
About, but no one really knows how to calculate the value. And now I'm actually seeing, hey, if you do, you know, content A versus content B versus content C, this is gonna do a whole lot better organically.
- [06:30]
A
Way better.
- [06:31]
B
I mean, you'd have to spend a ton of money to get this, this kind of reach through paid and you're able to do it organically and people are actually sharing it and we're seeing all those metrics. So I think a move to leaning on creative as opposed to just trying to get the marketing math done, that's something I see happening a lot more in 2025.
- [06:48]
C
Well, great, great minds think alike. Cause one of my others was marketing goes back to the old school. And what I mean by that, and I'll say it so much better than me. Well, I just think there's this, if you look at where we are, it's harder and harder to stand out. There's more and more noise, there's more and more AI generated tsunami of terrible content. Like all that stuff's there. And then we've also got two other kind of things going on that are really interesting. The first one is that whole piece of the algorithms don't want you to leave the social platforms. So you end up with, you know, if you put a link into your content in most platforms, it's not going to do as well as if there wasn't a link in there. Okay, so there's a, there's a small incentive not to drive people away. But also people don't want to click out of the social platforms particularly they want to stay in LinkedIn, they want to stay in Instagram, they're quite happy sitting within the feed. Not to say that you don't, you know, you can't link out at all. But if you look at those two things, we end up in a no click environment where you're scrolling stuff is getting your engagement, it's making you think, it's driving search behavior afterwards. You are going on to do something afterwards, but your analytics can't tell you that. And this is a huge issue. So we always used to say, well, what happens if you click through from a social platform, from LinkedIn, from Instagram, then I leave, then I come back and I visit twice from Google and then I convert. I do the thing you want me to do and you say, well, it's okay. We can untangle that because Google Analytics 4 has got great attribution modeling built into it, and we can look at each of those steps. And I can tell you, yeah, that social media post had an impact. The problem is now what's happening is you're seeing the social. You're scrolling, you're stopping, you're engaging with the content by looking at it, by watching it, by reading it, then you're not clicking. Maybe another day you're searching for something, suddenly you're on my website from Google. So suddenly this solution we've talked about for years is like, oh, we can measure. Everything in digital marketing has gone. Because attribution modeling just doesn't give us the level of insight it used to do. And the reality is, actually, you say, well, marketing in 2025 is like marketing 1965 then. Because actually, what you need to do is come up with an amazing creative concept. You need to get it in front of the right eyeballs, and then hopefully they'll do your stuff, they'll buy your thing. Well, that's. That's the madman area of great advertising. Right. It's coming up with these. These great kind of concepts that really resonate with the target audience. So we've gone full circle a bit.
- [09:09]
B
It's totally full circle. And it's the attribution mirage. People feel as though because they can see somebody clicked to my website from go, it cost me 74 cents. I can attribute this client to that. But you didn't see the six pieces of social content. They saw the billboard, they saw the commercial, they saw the ad, they saw the friend who told them about it, and then they saw an email and then they clicked. And so it's complete. You know, it makes you. It's the old expression, 50% of my marketing doesn't work. I just don't know which half yet. You still don't know which half, even though Google has convinced you that you kind of do. There's a whole lot of missing information there. And I think you just kind of summed it up properly with, yeah, they've landed on your site today, but there was three months of activity that you just can't see.
- [09:52]
C
Yeah. And I think that we've been fooling ourselves for a long time because we came into digital marketing, said, well, you can measure everything now. And actually, Kieran, who I do the digital marketing podcast with, has this great expression of saying, really what you're doing is measuring the least wrong thing. So, you know, because really, what you're trying to do is Work out how somebody's head works. Okay? And you're trying to do that and how they make decisions when they don't know why they make decisions, they don't really know why they prefer one brand under another. They don't even notice half the interaction points they've had by seeing a billboard or, you know, whatever it might be. And Kieran always tells a great story, which is that he was working this E commerce brand and they'd set a load of kind of stuff running and then they come in on the Monday and sales have gone up 2000% and everyone's like, wow, this is exciting. Let's look at the analytics. And they see an increase from search, from direct traffic, people typing a website address, from social and from email. And they're like, this doesn't make any sense. And they're sitting there going, well, we ran this campaign and that campaign, they try and untangle it and then suddenly they notice that they got a two sentence mentioned in a national newspaper over the weekend and suddenly people saw it, they googled them, they typed in a website address, they went to their social, they clicked on emails that already had. So sometimes, you know, you're not getting the full picture in there. Maybe you can untangle it, but maybe you just won't know. And I think it's kind of going back to yes, we can measure, but it doesn't tell us the full picture. And actually, exactly to your point, it's creative that matters.
- [11:18]
B
Thanks for listening.
- [11:19]
A
Get my best stuff to your inbox@john davids.com we'll talk to you next time. This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Most companies want websites that look nice. But a lot of nice looking websites don't sell. What you really want is a website that grabs attention, builds trust and turns visitors into buyers while you sleep. That's what this Playbook gives you. Based on 10 years of work we've done at Influicity, optimizing websites for 7, 8 and 9 figure brands. Download the Playbook now at johndavids.com playbook that's johndavids.com Playbook.